PERFORMANCE

“But the moment of consummate disaster/My puppets turned to face the puppet master”

I was forty-four years old when the PERFORMANCE returned.
My name is not important. My profession was formerly that of a specialised accountant. I attended meetings in the identical offices of every nation. I shook hands with others like myself and arranged how money would flow from one entity to another in the least obtrusive fashion. My remit was considered difficult and prestigious, and I took no small measure of pride in it. All these binding regulations, people acquainted with the field would say to me over a snifter of brandy. Overlapping and contradicting, as tangled as a pile of snakes and twice as disagreeable. How on earth do you keep up with it all? And I would smile and say I had a head for such matters, and leave it at that.
In reality, the work-rules and the people-rules that I filed within my skull were laughably crude and simple compared to my other set of rules, which I had named my puppet-rules. My puppet-rules governed everything outside of my work-rules and people-rules and so naturally encompassed a far wider range of possibilities, growing and branching without end. You could even go so far as to call them my world-rules. They all conformed to a similar pattern for ease of recall — a flat prohibition of any act that could otherwise engender a PERFORMANCE:
Do not join anything that could be construed as an audience.
Do not approach anything that could be construed as a stage.
Do not acknowledge anything that could be construed as a puppet.
You may think all of this ridiculous. The preoccupations of a diseased mind. Childish fancies blown up to the size of nightmares like shadows on a wall. I would have been inclined to agree with you were I not in possession of incontestable proof that obeying those rules allowed me some semblance of a normal existence, and that ignoring them has invited the precise opposite into my life.
*
I’d taken an assignment in a city not far from my own. My task was straightforward. A creative interpretation of my client’s assets I had achieved many times before. More taxing for me was the requisite glad-handing after the office shuttered each evening. My hosts went to great lengths to make me feel welcome, mistaking my vigilance for a standoffish disposition as so many did. It took several nights of rich meals and richer liqueurs before I finally managed to extricate myself from their clutches with some feeble excuses, and not a moment too soon. For in that foreign city I could sense the puppet-rules would soon be employed. My palms burned without heat, and my fingers curled and flexed of their own accord. Years could pass without the threat of a PERFORMANCE but they would always return, heralded in the days and hours before by a warning in my very flesh, something between palsy and possession.
Why I paused at the window of that trinket shop I will never know. Perhaps something caught my eye, a suggestion of movement half-visible beneath the smudged reflection of my own silhouette. It was at the edge of the historic district, a space where neither locals nor tourists dwelt for long. At first I assumed the shop condemned like all the others in that row, but the meticulously arranged display within, barely lit by a dying bulb, suggested otherwise. Cracked porcelain jostled for space with glue-gunned curios and fridge magnets slathered in the city colours. Collapsed ships-in-bottles balanced precariously alongside faded postcards of fields. A revelry of dust-shrouded junk, of matter fundamentally worthless and ugly even before the ravages of time had caught up with them. I must admit I was as captivated as I was repelled, as if I had caught the cloying scent of a basket of rotten apples. So thoroughly had my morbid interests been piqued, so absorbed was I in savouring the delightful shabbiness of the place, the aura of decrepitude that infused it and that seemed tailor-made for my tastes…well, I scarcely noticed when the pair of tatty velvet curtains at the back twitched fitfully and two pairs of eyes caught that flickering light.
On occasion I would encounter cases that required swift interpretation and decisive action, to be later entered into my corpus of puppet-rules. I had clearly made the wrong choice standing before that spread of oddments and had brought about a PERFORMANCE.
When I realised my error I backed into the road, a groan erupting from my chest. I hurried as fast as I could through that in-between district while shadows flitted at the edges of my vision. Before long I was forced to slow to a halting limp as my lungs and joints protested in synchrony, and then to stop entirely. It had been a close call, for usually I could spot the setup of a PERFORMANCE well in advance. Another thought arose that I quickly swatted down but not before it had spoken: what if the situation earlier has been deliberately engineered, a trap baited for my benefit? No. To consider those events as anything other than random episodes would lead me to thoughts I could not entertain even for a moment.

#
My room on the first floor of the hotel — a request for a windowless suite had not been accommodated — was untouched. Upon my arrival I dug out a blister of pills from my wash-bag and swallowed them dry, feeling them catch in the base of my throat. My final contingency for such occasions. I drew the curtains facing my bed shut and turned on the lamps and overhead lights. Eventually, with the sedatives suffusing my blood, my body softened and grew heavy and I drifted away.
I came to later in darkness. The insides of my head felt replaced with balls of cotton wool, my skin coated in a layer of filth. In my haste I must have miscounted my dose, for it was still deep night. Grimy yellow beams flitted between the raindrops on the glass, illuminating the foot of my bed. But I had closed my curtains, hadn’t I? Not to mention the lights.
Something crawled inside of my palms to pluck at my tendons. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Throughout my life, each episode had been separated by months, if not years, of dormancy. For those…things to return so soon, to visit where I slept, was simply unthinkable. There were rules. And yet I found myself sitting upright in my bed, resigned to my role already in what came next.
#
For the longest time there was nothing but the fingertip drumming of the rains. And then, slowly, so slowly, two shrunken figures bobbed up from the bottom of the window frame, swaying back and forth. One was a greying sack, clad in what appeared to be a knitted coat. Were it not for his pink nose and prominent whiskers you would struggle with what exactly he was supposed to be. Even if you did somehow conclude ‘rat’ or even ‘rodent’, that didn’t explain those seven stubby legs, nor the crablike claws they terminated in.

His companion was equally undefinable, a formless tatter of black felt and feathers. The only indication that the bizarre figures were supposed to be a pair was their eyes, for both possessed gleaming amber orbs pricked with black star-burst pupils. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were staring straight at me despite how they rolled and roamed.

They weren’t supposed to be there, some churlish part of me repeated through my fear. There were puppet-rules. But it was too late. The puppets began — or more accurately, they resumed — their PERFORMANCE.
Although the details of the scenes were different every time, I had caught enough of their dialogue in my hurried escapes before to recognise their central argument. The pair would begin by expounding upon their strange beliefs in droning proclamations and withered insinuations. A worldview rose dripping from the nonsense. Rat would insist upon a denial of life and death, for both were insignificant markers upon an endless, ashen horizon, fleeting acts in a play with no backdrop and no audience.
Crow would grow increasingly agitated as the speech progressed, interjecting with curses on its own puppet-life, a pitiful existence as a bundle of rags, merely a receptacle of another’s wants and desires. It would alternate between pleas for release to mumbling catatonia and back again, each shift demarcated by bursts of violence from Rat.
Rat, conversely, cared little for his predicament. Although he alluded to the limited nature of his standpoint, complaining of being tethered, any question of free will or motivation was never tabled. On the contrary, he seemed to relish his predicament, wheedling endlessly in that strained falsetto of his about certain truths privy only to puppets.
Mister Crow has been very naughty, Rat stage-whispered. Very naughty indeed yes. He angled his flabby body towards the windowpane as if listening.

Why? I’ll tell you why, he squeaked, although a husky note had crept in. He’s a traitor. A traitor to all of us.

Crow opened and shut his beak with a click.

Rat dipped down and returned brandishing a club. His companion backed off, croaking and raising his wings over his head.

He was going to tell of our secrets, Rat continued, his little bulk shaking with anger. He would ruin our fun. Because he feels guilty. Guilty! He knew what he was getting into…all of it…

I could hardly doubt that these were indeed hand-puppets I was watching. On occasion a flash of a soiled sleeve would pop into view, blotchy with filth, the ragged edges blending into the frayed fibres of the puppets. While Rat quivered and twitched convincingly, Crow hardly moved a jot, as if he’d been placed atop a dead branch. Only with great difficulty did that dull yellow beak crack open and shut.

That’s not true, murmured the confused voice of an old man, not quite in time with the staccato movements of the beak. I don’t know how I got here. Please help me.
Oh, silly Crow, Rat chuckled. All those hows and whys filling you up like so much cheap bread. I’ll bash them out of you. Should I bash them out of him, children?
To leave the room I would’ve needed to draw closer to the window. The prospect of approaching those puppets, let alone catching a glimpse of whoever crouched hidden below the sill…well, it was frankly unbearable. And so I could only quiver in my patch of gloom, praying that I would not be the witnessing the fated conclusion of the PERFORMANCE.
Won’t somebody please help me, Mister Crow pleaded again, in that voice of an ordinary, frightened man.
“What do you want from me? Why now?”
At first I wasn’t certain I had even whispered those words aloud. But I must have, for something happened I had never seen before. Both figures stopped and drooped as if suddenly rendered comatose. Rat said in his nasal sneer:
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will return after a short interlude.
The puppets dropped away into the night, as if whatever had held them up had vanished in an instant. I lay there for a while afterwards, still as a rabbit in a trap. There was no sound from outside except the growing downpour. If there was a figure in the hedgerow beneath the window, they were weightless and flopping in the thorny branches. I didn’t look. I couldn’t look.
Keeping as far from the window as I could, my back to the wall, I edged into the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

#
I’m not sure how long I shivered in the tub but the puppets didn’t return. The next morning I caught my train home, an exhaustion deeper than a single restless night settling into my tissues. A couple of whiskeys helped to take the edge off somewhat. As my nerves began to dull, I tried to convince myself that the events of the night before could only have been an aberration, elicited through some grievous breach of my puppet-rules that I had previously been ignorant of. Unfortunate, yes. Unpleasant, certainly. But addressable. All that was required was to determine what had triggered another PERFORMANCE in such a short span of time and update my rules to close off that possibility forever.
For a while, I truly believed that would be it.
Several months later, I was returned to that same city not far from my own. My assignment this time, however, was more penance than pleasure. Suffice to say the events at the hotel disturbed me more deeply than I anticipated. Since then I had been neglecting my duties, spending my evenings poring over notes on my prior movements, identifying where I had broken or bent a puppet-rule. Of course I had lingered too long before that display of touristic ephemera. And speaking to the apparitions before my bed had been foolish in the extreme. But had there been other violations, a careless word or glance, some critical factor I had until now remained unaware of in all my years? There must have been something I was missing.
To an outside observer I must have appeared a paranoid wreck, although any who would dare to enquire after my health would receive noncommittal answers. If I told the truth I would’ve been encouraged to consult some unhelpful station of authority – the police or the doctors or the church. But I was not being pursued by a madman, a hallucination, or a manifestation of my earthly sins. My tormentors were outside law-rules, medicine-rules, god-rules.
The contagion of doubt afflicting my puppet-rules spread to my work-rules. My superiors grew concerned, then alarmed. Before long any communications to me were filtered through the calibrated language of the HR representative. A series of reviews were put in place, ostensibly to manage my performance.
My hosts wanted very little to do with me upon my return. No doubt they could hear the downswing of the corporate axe whistling towards my neck. Their caution was vindicated by my insistence on working in a dingy windowless room, and the less said about my actual performance the better. My preoccupation crowded out the work-rules stored within my skull, leaving only crooked and squashed semblances of logical thought. It came as no surprise to me when I was asked one day to leave early, to get some rest while they figured out how to cleanly discharge me from their service.

I felt a nauseous presentiment as I walked out among the milling crowds of the business district, looking up into the countless glass faces of the towers before me. Was every window of those buildings not a potential stage? Everything around me buckled with a hideous latent possibility, every blind corner and shaded alleyway. There was no way I could make it back to my rented room that evening without witnessing a PERFORMANCE in the district between districts, creeping ever closer to some dread conclusion.

I did the only thing I could think of. I headed out of the city, past hollowed-out factories, past mercifully shuttered storefronts daubed with fading graffiti. My fellow travellers thinned out as the sky darkened. The few I passed grew hunched and ragged. After a while the only signs of human life were the empty nests of cardboard and soiled bedding I passed beneath rotten awnings.

I don’t know for how long I walked, gaze fixed on the horizon. Long enough for it to curdle from yellow to grey-brown, a sulfurous rim of polluted light. Eventually I reached strange hinterlands of the city where it merged with another, igniting with unseen fluorescence like some deep-sea growth. An expanse sprouting with airless stands of flophouses, garages, storage units, junkyards, glowing and empty.

It was upon an elevated road that I slipped from my trance of self-preservation and my legs grew leaden and clumsy. I found myself alongside a ribbon of tarmac where the cars zipped past far too fast, only darkness and air on my other side. A truck blared past mere inches from me. The last thing I saw before I lost my footing and tumbled down the embankment wall was a pair of little lacy curtains fluttering in the rear window, two silhouettes leaning in to watch me fall.

#
When I was very young, my parents took me to a fair on the village commons. That year was a particularly punishing summer. Heat trembled from the cracked earth in clotted waves. Although they tried their hardest to shepherd me around the scheduled sights – the exhausted rabbits in the petting zoo, the wilting displays of vegetables, the vintage steam engines glossed in thick black paint like melting tar – it soon grew apparent that I was suffering in the glare of the sun. Wishing to protect my fragile constitution, or perhaps seeking a moment of respite from my complaints, they placed me among the other frail and bookish children who had gathered in the unkempt grass at an oak-shaded corner of the commons. A lopsided stall had been erected there, little more than a narrow crimson box, an upright coffin with some dirty curtains pinned back from the window to reveal rosy-cheeked figures bobbing in the foreground. The fliers hadn’t mentioned a puppet show.

We arrived as the PERFORMANCE was drawing to a close. A pair of jesters carried on a series of mocking bows while a crackly recording of an orchestra piped out from some hidden speaker. One by one, the other children got up and left with curious and benumbed expressions. None paid me any mind as I made myself comfortable on the cool earth, waiting for the next show to begin.

I believe my stepfather or mother must have revealed my name to the puppet master, a wiry fellow dressed in a faded corduroy suit. They must have approached him when he slipped out of his box for a smoke break. Perhaps they thought I would appreciate being brought into the PERFORMANCE as a participant, that it would draw me out of my self-absorbed shell for a little while. When they had left, the puppet master sighed and stamped his cigarette out. His bloodshot eyes settled on me.

I suppose we had better get on with it he said and stretched out his hands, wincing as he did so, for they were pocked with flaky, rust-coloured scabs.

As he made preparations he talked to me about his work, mistaking my compliance for interest. What I was about to see was no mere frolic, he claimed. It was a craft, passed down through the generations from one puppet master to another, a lineage traceable back to the Commedia dell’arte hundreds of years ago, perhaps even further. I nodded as if I understood, and he revealed his yellowing teeth. I was a good boy, he said. Many people in his line of work, his old partner included, considered hand-puppets a lower form of life compared to marionettes, incapable as they were of the complex articulation required to imitate the human form convincingly. In the earliest days of his trade such comments stung him, but no longer. He knew now that the staid judgements of others were born of ignorance. He could express baser truths than they could ever imagine with his chosen tools.

Or – and he lowered his voice then, although nobody else was around – one could say they had chosen him. For to be a master of his school was a rare form of service, a duty that couldn’t be described, only felt in one’s tissues and tendons. After that aside he seemed to grow suddenly embarrassed, licking his lips and mumbling as he looked blandly around. Without pausing he folded himself into that narrow booth, taking up much less space than I thought possible for a man his size, and disappeared from view.

I remember little of the first section of the PERFORMANCE. I was a neurotic and dreamy child. The world behind my eyes was ceaselessly painted with smoke and shadows, and the gurning punches exchanging blows before me could hardly compare to the sights I so often conjured with my mind. I wondered idly why they took turns battering one another, if there was a secret choreography to their chaos. I suspect now that this thought was my undoing, for when I ceased my daydreaming, those figures had gone. New puppets had risen in their stead, grubbier and altogether more…unwholesome, incorporating patchwork elements of human and animal in their sloppily-stitched skins, recalling taxidermy I had once seen at a dentists office. They swiped at each other and cursed in rough voices as an accordion groaned tunelessly. Something was wrong with how they moved.

Then the music faded to a soft hiss and those crooked figures slowed. They turned to face out towards the audience, towards me, ceasing their violent escapades now that they had my full attention. With their voices in a conspiratorial stage-whisper they addressed me by my name. They asked me to join them in their great work, to take on the role that they could carve for me out of the world. Time was of the essence, for soon their PERFORMANCE would draw to an end, and then the decision would be made for me. They spoke of other things too, tales of what was yet to come. Essential truths about this universe that I could not, or would not, countenance, interpreted from the ceaseless clangour of the stars and among the entrails of animals hit by cars. Puppet-rules.

Eventually one such rule, base and shocking and cold, rattled me from my stupor. I scrambled up and sprinted away over the bleached earth as fast as my pudgy little legs could carry me, streaming snot and tears.

On the drive back, my parents could hardly understand why I had grown so upset at the sight of Mouse and Mister Pigeon. The puppet master was more than happy to show them off when they confronted him. His shows sometimes caused distress, it was true, he admitted with an apologetic and close-lipped smile, but none of the other children had seemed so shaken up. If I had just stayed until the end, the puppetmaster explained, eyes swivelling to meet mine, the boy would have beheld a most satisfying conclusion to the tale. Oh, yes. Everything would have made sense then.

That stuff…it’s not real, my stepfather said, wiping his face with his hand as we sat in the sweltering snarl of traffic, our car fighting against the flow of traffic on the highway. You should know that by now. I stayed silent. It wasn’t that I believed the puppets were real. On the contrary, what had disturbed me so was the fact that I could see the margin where they ended and the flaking, liver-spotted arm of the puppet-master began. The pirouettes and prances those hand-puppets performed, those syncopated, liquid movements, could not possibly be the work of the limbs they balanced upon. Those obscenities they uttered could not have both come from a single mouth in the sweltering darkness of the puppet-booth. What I had been watching had worn the puppet show as trappings, for there was a far older and more obscure PERFORMANCE encoded in the gambols of those crooked figures. But how could a child explain such a thing?

My mother turned in her seat with a bedraggled smile. There, there. Perhaps the boy has caught a fever, she said. I wondered what she meant until I followed her gaze down to my own hands, faintly shaking of their own merry accord.
#
I came to my senses at the base of a muddy bank, my descent cushioned by a snarl of dried-out brambles. My head throbbed, and my fingers came away red when I touched my temple. The sky was a uniform predawn grey which gave no hint of where or when the sun might emerge. The road far above behind me still roared, the cars now invisible. I forced myself onto unsteady limbs, shivering, my suit soaked through with dew. A queer relief washed over me. I had a head injury, and the parts of me that weren’t numb burned and ached, but I was otherwise unmolested. Stretching out before me I could spy nothing but churned-up fields and skeletal hedgerows.
The rise back up to the road was more a cliff, too steep to even attempt to scale. Instead I tramped through damp and sucking mud parallel to the earthworks, following its flight back to the city. Despite my numerous injuries, to say nothing of my prospects of continued employment, I was filled at that moment with an idiot elation. Among the mounds of leaves and mud choked with litter there was nowhere for my tormentors to hide. I could even espy a way out in the next field, a tractor-churned ramp that would take me back onto the trunk road, where maybe I could hitch a ride. Perhaps upon my return matters could be salvaged. I could request a break from my work for a while, in order to accurately update and capture the changed circumstances in which I now operated. A long break in a basement room. It was necessary. A lifetime of rules would need adjusting, after all. They could, at any moment, be bent back until they snapped.
In the centre of the field lay a burnt-out car. I must have mistaken it for a heap of debris before. The earth around it was black and grey, dotted with spikes of charred grass. I was still a hundred paces from the machine when I saw them cavorting and bobbing behind the shattered remains of the windscreen. Something within me gave way, cracked and finally caved in, and I heard a strangled cry that could only have come from me. I knew then what I had always suspected, deep down. That the PERFORMANCE had been happening around me constantly, behind closed doors and sealed windows, and in my hubris I had brought it here.

There was nothing else to be done.

Matters were well underway when I took my seat in the damp grass. In the morning half-light the depths of the puppets degradation was clear. Barely held together by countless knotted threads they sat atop forearms naked and leprous, so consumed by sores and cankers that I scarcely believed they could belong to a living being.

Rat was addressing an unseen crowd, weaving a fairytale of a disordered universe where the stars rolled in their sockets and the blanket of darkness between them was pulled tight by nameless things underneath. A monstrous stage of crushing shadows, where the performers took their silly little roles so painfully seriously even though nobody was watching, their lines drowned out by the howl of cosmic winds.

Crow slumped in the corner of the windscreen, unmoving.

The solution to such chaos was simple, Rat continued with measured impatience, as if addressing a particularly dull child. The only way to carry on in such an interminable state of affairs was not to live and not to die. To embrace a third way, the puppet’s secret – to ignore all that nonsense insisting on what the living do and what the dead do not. To dance upon a highwire of tendon-string in a rust-coloured dusk, eyes always glinting as if ready to see, mouth always open as if ready to speak. Whether as a parasite atop a decaying hand or mouldering at the bottom of shoebox, puppet-beings needn’t concern themselves delineations as trite as alive or dead, there or not there.

I closed my eyes, willing myself not to hear any more, but the Rat did not stop, false eyes gleaming with malignant stupidity.

They had tried very hard to educate the wretches who could not help but hear their call, those who could not help but be drawn to those quiet and decrepit spaces, funfairs and borstals and asylums. To learn more, all one needed to do was cast off those useless gloves of skin and let your hands provide life to those unable to sustain it on their own. This act of charity, Rat added proudly, was a part of the compact made with their masters since time immemorial, back when the first man had looked into the eyes of the first puppet and thought he saw a shadow pass across them.

Mr. Crow stirred, flopping. As he slumped, he revealed a jagged cicatrix of keloids that ringed the ruined forearm of his host. He mumbled something that sounded like No, no , no. He’s lying. There is nothing… Rat stopped and turned in silence, shaking with exaggerated fury. He dipped down and returned with a wicked-looking shard of sooty glass clasped in his claws.

Some birdbrains still can’t help but cause trouble, can they? He laughed, hollowly. Ho-ho. What do we do with their kind?

Whack! He gurgled as he struck the other puppet – the other hand – with a speed and savagery that made me start. Whack, whack, whack. Mr. Crow only groaned as feathers flew off to reveal a pelt of crusted black blood. Before long the crow resembled a vulture, and then it didn’t resemble anything but a pair of glass eyes stuck to a gouged and sopping mitt. Clouded fluids weeped down the scarred wrist like an overripe fruit.

Both voices were talking now, impossibly, one over the other.

Whack – please, stop – whack – you’ve made a mistake. This is a mistake. I shouldn’t be here – whack, whack – I was promised-

In his passions, Rat too had begun to fray at the seams. The puppet-body rippled as if tremendous reconfigurations were taking place beneath that skein of burlap and felt. I caught snatches of what lay beneath, flashes of old bone, a panoply of joints. I understood how those seven stubby arms could be manipulated with such dexterity, and wished to learn no further.

While they struggled and writhed I took my leave from among the spectral audience, staggering back to the highway. There was no need for me to linger. My curiosity had been more than sated, and my earlier desires to bring about some denouement to the PERFORMANCE had suddenly shrivelled to nothing — along with any fantasises of confronting my tormentor. For were I to peer within the burnt-out car, I was sure there wouldn’t be much to see of any person at all. At any moment I expected something clicking and wriggling to close upon my shoulder from behind, but the screeches and squeals of the show drifted on without me, performing to an empty field, until the merciful roar of the traffic erased even that.

#
Now I wander the streets of the city again in the growing daylight, smeared with ash and mud. The crowds veer and swerve around me. No doubt they can see how my hands twitch. Before such a premonition would be a source of great concern to me, but it is clear to me now that the content of my rules never made any difference. Any and all protection they offered was illusory, a pattern briefly ascertained in swirling chaos before collapsing and scattering again into nothingness.

I know that nowhere was ever safe, will ever be safe. A warehouse or an oubliette could be the next venue for the appearance of those loathsome puppets. What is left of them. No doubt they are putting on a rehearsal in some rotted burrow for an audience of nothing and no-ones as I speak, mere scraps of costumes stuck to the juddering sores of their master, who is in turn a greater puppet, a flensed glove stretched over the stuff between stars.

I know too that soon their never-ending show will reach a conclusion of sorts. Perhaps it would be fairer to call it the completion of a cycle, for the PERFORMANCE started long before I was born and will continue long after I’m gone. Those puppets will turn, as they were always going to turn, to face me. They will address me by name, as if I am an old friend, a most ardent admirer, and they will grant me the opportunity I have been expecting for so very long. There are many more lessons to impart to strange and lost children, and their current master is almost all used up.

I know that no matter my response, one day soon I will look down upon my hands and find them looking back up at me through two sets of glinting amber eyes.